If, as Tony Blair is alleged to believe, the family is the new battleground of British politics, then Beverley Hughes is firmly on the frontline. As minister for children, young people and families, she began this autumn’s new political season with a barrage of announcements and initiatives – all part, she claims, of a major government push to ‘completely transform what families and children can rightly expect a modern state to make available for them’. And while the publication of the Conservatives’ tax review suggested that it is Britain’s wealthiest families who have most to gain from a Cameron premiership, the government’s agenda appears to have an altogether different focus.

Last month, Hughes joined the education secretary Alan Johnson in unveiling the children in care green paper. A welter of well-intentioned government initiatives over the past decade aimed at this ‘most vulnerable’ group of children, suggests the minister, have ‘made a bit of difference but not on the scale we need to see’. Indeed, she claims, the statistics on young people in care remain ‘absolutely shocking’. While, for instance, children in care are three times more likely to become teenage mums, their educational attainment levels fall far below the average.

In response, the green paper proposes pilot schemes to test a range of options, from allowing young people to remain in care until they are 21 to new professional training and salaries for foster carers. Bursaries to allow children to go to university, as well as free transport to enable them to travel to the same schools even if they move home are proposed.

But is the government willing to back its ambitions with new resources? There is, claims Hughes, ‘money behind everything we want to pilot’, while any future ‘national rollout’ could form part of the Department for Education and Skills’ pitch in the comprehensive spending review. However, she argues, ‘I don’t accept that, in general, the level of resource is an issue here.’ Hughes points to the fact that government spending on children in care has doubled over the past four years and now amounts to nearly £2bn, focused on 60,000 children. ‘If we can’t do better than we are doing with that amount of money for a relatively small amount of children,’ she argues, ‘we really shouldn’t be in the business.’

As the government tests new ways to improve the lot of children in care, it is also pushing ahead with rapidly expanding former experiments such as Sure Start and extended schools into nationwide programmes. In September, Hughes announced that both, which form key parts of the cross-government Every Child Matters strategy, are ahead of target.

But although the opening of the 1000th Sure Start centre at the beginning of last month – a critical milestone on the road to the 3,500 planned for 2010 – underlines the government’s commitment to the early years’ scheme, some suggest that Labour has failed to build a strong enough constituency of support to defend this new frontier of the welfare state against possible future Tory assault. Indeed, the prime minister’s expression of disappointment in May that Sure Start had apparently failed to reach some of the most disadvantaged children – a simple restatement of last year’s DfES national evaluation – was treated by some as heresy.

Hughes, however, is confident that as Sure Start expands, so the support for it will grow. ‘I’ve talked to a lot of people, as I do at every children’s centre, who don’t need any convincing at all once they experience the way that children’s centres can make a difference to real people, real children,’ the minister argues. ‘There is a constituency of support and you try taking some of those children’s centres away, and you will see how strong that support is.’

But what of the evaluation’s findings to which the prime minister referred? Hughes believes the government needs to take seriously its suggestion that the outcomes for the children of ‘some of the very, very most difficult families to reach – very often teenage parents and young parents living with their children’ were ‘not as good as you would have wanted’, but she also argues that ‘we are on a journey here; we aren’t going to get everything right in the first few years.’

Hughes is also confident that the government’s extended schools programme – by which schools offer a range of services such as childcare, homework clubs, adult learning, and access to their arts, sports and ICT facilities – can bring real benefits to disadvantaged communities. So far, 2,500 schools are offering the full range of services, with an additional 500 providing some form of extended service. A largely positive report for the DfES in September nonetheless expressed some concern about whether the benefits of extended schools were ‘sufficiently widespread to transform whole communities’. But Hughes believes this is simply a matter of scale: ‘We’re not at a position at which in most areas there’s more than a few schools providing [the full] offer,’ she suggests. Where, however, a critical mass of extended schools has been reached – in Portsmouth, for instance, it is now 100 per cent – the minister believes the real benefits of the scheme are becoming readily apparent.

Hughes also points to the ‘transformational’ effect experienced by many of the parents, especially women, she talks to at Sure Start centres: ‘The opportunity to come into the centre and to be acknowledged as somebody with a contribution to make (in practice, people have got involved with the board of the centre [and] taken responsibility for aspects of it) … has allowed them to think beyond that and get jobs or change their lives. That’s been a really important part.’

Indeed, Hughes is anxious to highlight the wider context of the government’s agenda. She sees Labour’s commitment to families as being ‘right at the heart’ of what the party is attempting to achieve socially and economically. But, she notes, it’s important to recognise that the progress of the last decade and delivering on the commitments the party has already made will not be enough. ‘Families’ lives are changing and what we thought families needed in 1997 is not the same as what we think they need now or may need in the future. We need to think ahead,’ she argues. The minister is, for instance, concerned that, despite progress, ‘the inequality gap is still there’ and, in fact, ‘for some children, the gap is actually widening’.

Hughes also suggests that the government needs to do a lot more thinking about parents and what they need in the future. ‘Very often for this generation of parents, they are not only caring for children, but they are also caring for the older generation. They are the sandwich generation in terms of the demands on them,’ she argues. She notes that both fathers and mothers increasingly want to work and share caring for their children, particularly in the child’s early years. In two-parent families, furthermore, Hughes believes that the relationship between the couple also needs to be acknowledged. There are ‘some interesting and possibly tricky’ questions about how best to support couples in relationships, Hughes suggests, but it is also important to recognise that ‘couples are the weathervane for the family. If they aren’t getting on, then the family suffers.’ And thus in the battle for the hearts and minds of Britain’s families, Beverley Hughes seems more than ready to open another new front.